


Lasting Love

by Catstaff



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-26
Updated: 2020-09-26
Packaged: 2021-03-08 04:20:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,628
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26669593
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Catstaff/pseuds/Catstaff
Summary: Harry and Hermione's youngest asks questions about their relationship.Written for Harmony & Co's Lyric Llama, inspired by “Call it dumb luck, but baby, you and I can't even mess it up, although we both try. No, it don't always go the way we planned it, But the wolves came and went and we're still standing.” —The Bones by Maren Morris
Relationships: Hermione Granger/Harry Potter
Comments: 4
Kudos: 62
Collections: Lyric Llama





	Lasting Love

“My eyes!” yelped Amaranth Potter, the youngest of Harry and Hermione’s four children and the only one still in school, as she walked into the kitchen to see her parents snogging. “Honestly, you two, you’re worse than some of the kids at Hogwarts! I’m scarred for life after that,” she added with a laugh.

“You are not scarred for life,” Harry retorted. “Besides, it’s not as if you caught us naked or anything. Get Charlus to tell you about the time he walked in on us in the bath.”

“Remember when Rose caught you kissing my neck and thought you’d become a vampire?” Hermione asked her husband.

He laughed. “Of course! And how about when Erik barged into the bedroom to tattle on Charlus about something, and we were not only naked, you were about to…”

“EWW! Nope, nope, nope!” Amaranth jokingly stuck her fingers in her ears and closed her eyes. “La la la, I can’t hear you!”

Hermione grinned. “Serves you right, sleeping so late, young lady,” she said. “If you’d been up at a decent hour, maybe we’d have remembered that you’re home for the hols and been a little more circumspect. Just because we’ve been married almost thirty years doesn’t mean we aren’t still affectionate, you know.”

Amaranth smiled. “Yeah, I know,” she said. “I actually think it’s kind of cool that you’re still so in love after all these years. Even if it leads to the occasional sight I’d rather not see. Seriously, how do you do it?”

Harry poured tea for all three of them and handed Amaranth the plate of eggs benedict and pan-fried potatoes that he’d fixed earlier and put under stasis for her. “Some luck, I suppose, but also knowing that we’re both human and mess things up at times. And being willing to forgive each other when we mess things up.”

“It’s really that simple?” Amaranth asked, taking a bite of her food. “Mmm, thanks, Dad.”

“You’re welcome,” Harry said, “and yes, it is.”

“Well, sort of,” Hermione put in. “Simple on paper, perhaps, but it can be a bit harder to live it. Merlin knows there were a few times over the years that I’m surprised your father stayed friends with me, forget deciding he wanted to date me.”

“Like what?” Amaranth looked between her parents in fascination. 

“Your father’s Firebolt was the first big mistake on my part,” Hermione said. “It was our third year. His old Nimbus 2000 had been smashed by the Whomping Willow after dementors invaded the pitch during a quidditch game – and then at Christmas, someone unknown sent him a Firebolt. One of the first ones for sale to the public, at that, and top-of-the-line international standard. Something professional quidditch players flew. At the time, it was thought that an escaped prisoner was after Harry, so I immediately decided that the criminal in question must have sent the broom to him after cursing it to France and back, as a way of killing him without getting caught. I went behind Harry’s back to Professor McGonagall, who was our Head of House back then, and she confiscated the Firebolt. Kept it for a month or more, trying to find any curses on it.”

“I was furious at the time,” Harry picked up the tale. “Mind, if Hermione had said something to me, you know, something like, ‘It’s possible someone sent that to you with curses attached, would you please let someone look at it before you fly it?’ I would have been okay with that and done it. Not happy with losing the broom for however long, but I would have understood concern for my safety. My problem was that she didn’t talk to me first, she just went right to a teacher as if I was a small child unable to listen to reason.”

“You obviously made up at some point,” Amaranth commented.

“I got over being angry once I got the Firebolt back,” Harry admitted cheerfully. “Plus old Lucius Malfoy was trying to get one of the school hippogriffs put down as a menace, just because his spoiled prat of a son didn’t listen to the teacher in Care of Magical Creatures class and got injured because he did the exact opposite of what we were told to do. Your mother was taking too many classes and trying to help Hagrid put together a good defense for the hippogriff, and she was wearing herself to a thread. I decided that I didn’t want to lose one of my best friends over a broom and she apologised for going behind my back to McGonagall and we were good after that.”

“Professor McGonagall,” Hermione put in reflexively, to laughs from her husband and daughter.

Amaranth sipped her tea. “Did you ever screw up like that, Dad?”

Harry nodded. “Of course. There’s a couple of times I can think of that my actions or lack of nearly got your mother killed, so I’m also in the ‘surprised she stayed friends with me’ camp. The first one, we were just firsties, and Ron Weasley, who I considered a friend back then, insulted Hermione after she tried to help him in Charms class. She ran off crying and hid in a bathroom for the rest of the day, and to my eternal shame, I didn’t try to stop her or even defend her from Weasley’s tirade. She didn’t come to the Halloween feast that evening, and then a teacher came running in to announce that a troll had got into the castle. Supposedly it was in the dungeons and I knew she was on the second floor so I dragged Weasley with me to go warn her about it. But the troll got in and trapped us and it was sheer dumb luck we managed between the three of us to distract it and knock it out.”

“Wow… what was the other?” Amaranth asked.

“End of fifth year,” Harry said. “I was informed – falsely – that Voldemort was torturing my godfather somewhere in the Department of Mysteries, and I was determined to go rescue him. Hermione warned me that it was more likely than not to be a trap, but I wouldn’t listen to her. She and a few others insisted on accompanying me to London. She was right, it was a trap. We got ambushed by Death Eaters and one hit her with a curse that almost killed her. Probably would have done if he’d cast the spell vocally, but we hadn’t yet been taught about silent casting and assumed a silencing spell would take someone out of the fight, at least until someone else cancelled it. Fortunately for your mother, casting non-verbally generally reduces the power of a spell.”

“And yet in the end, that’s what brought us together,” Hermione said. “The Weasleys, Ron and his younger sister Ginny, they chose to lay all the blame for their injuries at Harry’s door. I told them what I thought of them for doing that. Harry had tried to stop all of us from going with him that night. We all chose to take the risk and go with him. Obviously, I wasn’t happy to have gotten injured so badly, but I owned my decision to be there and chance injury in the first place. They didn’t. And then Ronald had the nerve to tell Harry he expected ‘proper monetary compensation’ for his injuries, most of which were self-inflicted because he couldn’t resist poking his hands into some sort of experimental… something… that attacked him. And then said Harry ought to marry Ginny to make up for getting her injured as well.”

Harry snorted. “Right. She invited herself to a fight and broke an ankle, so I ought to marry her. Never mind that I’d been bitten by a mucking great basilisk saving her life a few years earlier without any one of the Weasleys suggesting I might be owed anything for my injuries. Anyway, I joined Hermione in telling the Weasleys what they could go do with themselves and refused to have anything to do with either of them after that. And discovered that studying with Hermione could be fun when Ron wasn’t constantly grumbling about doing the work, begging Hermione to copy her work because he hadn’t done his, trying to convince me to skive off with him, or all three at once.”

“I can only imagine how much he would have slowed us down when we were hunting out Voldemort’s artifacts,” Hermione said. “And then the final battle… I don’t think I’ve ever in my life been more joyful and scared out of my mind all at once, thanks to what you said to me before it all began.”

Amaranth quirked an eyebrow. “Oh? What did you say, Dad?”

“I told your mum I had every intention of coming out of it alive so I could marry her, so she wasn’t to believe any rumors of my demise unless she saw my body for herself,” Harry said.

Hermione nodded with a soft smile at the memory. “Do you blame me for feeling the way I did? I mean, my boyfriend proposed, sort of, just before going into battle with one of the worst Dark Lords Britain ever saw.”

“You two really have been through a lot,” Amaranth said. “I mean, I knew it up here,” she said, touching her head, “but not here.” She touched her chest over her heart.

“We both hope you never have to go through anything even close to what we did,” Harry said. “But no relationship is ever perfect. Just remember that with love, trust, and respect for one another, you can work through almost anything. Just like we did. Whatever life threw at us, we faced it together.”


End file.
